The Spartan Way by The Art of Manliness

Author:The Art of Manliness [BRETT AND KATE MCKAY]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: -
Publisher: BookBaby
Published: 2019-05-21T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 3

THE MINDSET AND TACTICS OF A

BATTLE-READY WARRIOR

At its peak, the Spartan army was the most dominant, and feared, military force in ancient Greece, and its prowess was built on the singular mentality and strategy it brought to the art of war.

In this final chapter, we’ll take an inspiring and thoroughly fascinating tour of the essential mindset and tactics that allowed these warriors to battle fiercely and come out the victor.

THERE IS POWER IN APPEARANCE

Spartan men not only had the skills and training to back up their reputation as formidable warriors, they enhanced that reputation—and their efficacy on the battlefield—by cultivating an external appearance that matched their internal prowess.

The Spartans terrorized their enemy before they even got within spears’ length of them. As they awaited the command to advance, they stood straight and steady in formation, and everything from their clothes to their equipment bespoke strength, discipline, and ferocity.

Spartan warriors were clothed in a scarlet tunic and cape (discarded prior to battle), for, Xenophon tells us, the color was thought to have “the least resemblance to women’s clothing and to be most suitable for war.” The latter statement gave rise to the apocryphal idea that red was also chosen because it hid blood better—concealing a wound, and a weakness, from the enemy.

Over his tunic and hung from his arm the Spartan hoplite carried armor and a shield which had been buffed to a brilliant shine and glinted in the sun.

Spartan men wore their hair long—a style which had once been common all over Greece, but which Lacedaemonians held onto after other city-states had shifted to shorter cuts. For the Spartans, long hair symbolized being a free man, and they believed, Plutarch says, “that it made the handsome more comely and the ugly more frightful.” The Spartans kept themselves well-groomed, often braiding these long locks, and keeping their beards neatly trimmed as well.

Atop their heads was placed a crowning piece of equipment which the narrator of Steven Pressfield’s Gates of Fire (a work of historical fiction accurate in many details) describes as the “most frightful of all”:

“Adding further to the theater of terror presented by the Hellenic phalanx…were the blank, expressionless facings of the Greek helmets, with their bronze nasals thick as a man’s thumb, their flaring cheekpieces and the unholy hollows of their eye slits, covering the entire face and projecting to the enemy the sensation that he was facing not creatures of flesh like himself, but some ghastly invulnerable machine, pitiless and unquenchable.”

The formidable appearance of the Spartan helmet was further enhanced by the fact it was “overtopped with a lofty horsehair crest which as it trembled and quavered in the breeze not only created the impression of daunting height and stature but lent an aspect of dread which cannot be communicated in words but must be beheld to be understood.”

The clothing and equipment of the Spartan warrior worked to his advantage in two ways: 1) it made the soldier himself feel more ferocious, more invincible, more confident, and 2) it intimidated the living daylights out of his foe.

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